2 thoughts on “Brain research and AI question reductionistic view of consciousness”

Agree with Steve:
I’ve read too much of A.C. Clarke’s thoughts on this to say that this is finality…Thought is computation, just on a higher level, we just haven’t understood it all yet. I doubt we ever will.

Let me tell you a little story. A story about who and what we are and what we can become.
Once, a long time ago, there was nothing. No space, no matter, no energy, no nothing. Maybe I should say, almost nothing. There was one thing. One highly complex point of consciousness. A consciousness alone unto itself that could only imagine what self-reflection was. It had nothing to reflect upon. It was lonely, even though it did not understand loneliness being the only consciousness.
It thought that if it could split itself into multiple parts. That perhaps it could look back upon itself. It could become a community instead of a singularity.
What it was made of at that point could not survive the separation and maintain any consciousness. It had to change its very nature and adopt something it did not have, mass.
This being had no mass but contained a complexity of pre-mass states. As the change occurred, so much mass was created that it could no longer be contained. This being exploded. Not only in mass but in consciousness. These were both distributed throughout the existence that we now call home.
This consciousness no longer was a single being. The explosion was too complete. It achieved self-reflection but it lost its individual sense of awareness as a being. It was no longer universal. It was fragmented, dispersed throughout existence.
Now, existence, through evolution (mutation), has to make forms complex enough that can house this part of the original being and use that consciousness energy which was also distributed to achieve awareness once again.
Each being capable of holding some of that consciousness, at death returns a more complex, patterned version of that energy to existence and thus recreating the universal consciousness a small piece at a time. We…all sentient life is in the process of evolving existence itself.